Milk and Honey

On my trip to New York City a couple months ago I visited a speakeasy called Milk and Honey on the lower east side. The place had some epic Prohibition cocktails and this message in the men's bathroom:

It reads:

Recalling
certain gentlemen of other days,
who made of drinking
one of the pleasures of life,
not one of its evils;
and who,
whatever they drank,
proved able to carry it,
keep their heads
and remain gentlemen,
even in their cups.
Their example is commended
to their posterity.

I Was Born to be a Regularfoot

It's true.

I ride waves with my right foot forward, but things were not supposed to be this way. I now understand people like Chastity (now Chaz) Bono, or Meg from Family Guy feel - people who had sex change operations because they felt like a men. I am a goofyfoot but I feel like a regularfoot.

I am right-handed, a key predictor of regularfootedness. I also skate and snowboard regular. I have tried doing those goofy and I just can't. It doesn't feel natural.

I love Santa Barbara and its litany of point breaks. I want to ride them frontside.

I see lefts and imagine I am Slater doing crazy tight turns, or Dane doing fin wofts.

I see rights and imagine I am Parko spreading butter all over everything.

Alas, I am destined to surf goofy. I could have been better than Slater if I were born a regularfoot (and that's my claim going forward), but it's too late to change. I will have to settle for surfing Rincon on my backhand, Uluwatu on my forehand, and still going straight on all these LA closeouts.

Sad, it is.

Channeling Sheng-Yen

Chan (Chinese Zen) Master Sheng-Yen wrote a book called There is No Suffering. It offers excellent insight into Buddhist philosophy, which I enjoy. The book takes its title from The Heart Sutra, a teaching that is central to Buddhism. There is no bible equivalent in Buddhism, but this is the probably the closest thing. One day I will transcribe it because it has an amazing ancient poetic style.

I digress.

The point of The Heart Sutra is to show that suffering is an illusion and when we integrate this idea into our lives we attain enlightenment. Basically, it is saying that life is full of a bunch of things that have no meaning and we attach negative meaning to them, which makes us suffer.

I know some things that are illusions:

There is no suffering and no end of suffering,
There is no surfing and no end of surfing,
There is no right path and no wrong path.
There are no paths and there is no box.
There is no school,
No right and no wrong,
No debit, credit, or credit card debt.
There is no physical pain and no mental pain.
There are no waves and no no waves.
There are certainly no rights and no lefts.
No points or reefs, no beachbreaks.
There are no friends and no enemies,
No deep conversations
Or ephemeral lust.
I have reason to doubt the existence of Australia,
Argentina, Algeria, Austria and Albania,
And I know there is no France.
Life does not exist and does not end.
Birth exists now and now and now
And thus does not exist.
There is no mind
No thoughts and no surviving ego.
There is no present
But there is really no past or future.
I will not grow old or grow young.
None of us exist now and
We will all one day cease to exist.